Western Digital Red 4TB & Se 4TB Hard Drives

We start off with synthetic results from the popular HD Tune and CrystalDiskMark utilities. They don't tell the whole story of course, but it's a quick and dirty way of gauging relative performance between drives and of course, it's easily reproducible by our readers at home.

The WD Se did well in HD Tune's transfer rate benchmark, which measures sequential speed across the entire disk, finishing just behind the VelociRaptor 1TB, the fastest hard drive on the market. The WD Red 4TB didn't perform nearly as well, as one would expect, but it also lagged behind the smaller capacity versions of the family. It did lead the Red series in access times but was still well behind drives with higher rotational speeds.

The random read/write results from CrystalDiskMark are more representative of the day-to-day workload of an operating system rather than transferring large chunks of sequential data (file transfers). With large 512K blocks, the Se impressed again, slightly edged out by the 600GB VelociRaptor, while the 4TB Red was almost on par its 3TB counterpart. The smaller 4K block size brought the Se back down to earth.